How to create data-driven content marketing strategy that drives results?

At the time of creating a content marketing strategy, you should be mindful about the results that you can achieve out of it. Then you can ensure the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy. To ensure the effectiveness of your content marketing strategy, you can think about developing it based on data. Keep on reading, and we will share the steps that you should follow to create a data-driven content marketing strategy effectively.

What is a data-driven content strategy?

A data-driven content marketing strategy is where you use available data in order to come up with a content marketing strategy and ensure its overall effectiveness. You will strategically analyze data that you have and come up with the content marketing strategy. Due to the same reason, the chances of your content marketing strategy failing are less. You will be able to collect data from your targeted audience, who are most likely to purchase the product or service that you are offering to the market.

The data-driven content would use information gathered from the customer profiles so that you can create an effective content marketing strategy. Due to the same reason, you should be equipped with a proper strategy to collect customer data and then analyze them. Otherwise, you cannot get the most out of your data-driven content marketing strategy.

Why does your content marketing need to be data-driven?

When you develop a content marketing strategy out of available data, you will be taking out assumptions and emotions from the picture. Instead, you will be getting the most out of past experiences and improve them.

Before you start publishing content online, you will need to take a look at the key performance indicators. The three most prominent key performance indicators that you should be mindful about are traffic, engagement, and conversion.

You should determine who is viewing your content and how many people are viewing it. Then you will need to take a look at the engagement, where you can see whether people are responding to your content or not. You should also check and confirm whether your traffic is being converted or not.

What Data Do You Need to plan a Data-Driven Content Marketing Strategy?

The very first step you should follow when you are planning your data-driven content marketing strategy is to develop buyer persona. Buyer persona refers to the ideal target customer of your business. After you set up buyer persona, you will be able to have a good understanding on what your customer would look like. Then you can create content that is appealing to the buyer that you have. In other words, you will find it as an easy task to tweak the overall content marketing campaign, when you have a clear understanding about the target audience. While keeping your ideal buyer in mind, you can personalize the blog posts, videos, and even other forms of content marketing campaigns that you run.

After creating the buyer persona, you should do data collection on customer demographics. This is where you will try to understand how much the existing audience you have fits well into the buyer persona profiles you created. This will provide some valuable information to you as you proceed with future planning.

For example, you can figure out what content your audience would love to enjoy and share. On the other hand, you can also understand what social platforms your buyers often tend to use. You may also take a look at the purchasing cycles and consumer habits of the ideal customers of your business.

Once you combine these details with the buyer persona, you will have enough information on the nature of content that you should create. On top of that, you will also know where you need to promote content and how you will be able to adjust the campaigns accordingly. This will eventually help you to understand the wants and needs of the customers. This can be the very first step that you can follow to develop an effective data-driven content marketing strategy.

What Do You Need to Execute Data-Driven Content?

There are some essentials that you would need to execute the data-driven content marketing strategy. Here’s a clear overview of what you would need.

—  Understand your customer

You should understand your customer before you execute the data-driven content marketing strategy. During the data collection process, it is possible for you to collect all useful data with related to the interaction of customers along with the brand. You should supplement that along with external data sources and demographics. For example, you can conduct industry related surveys and gather useful information. Based on them, you should include key insights, which would motivate the decision makers.

—   Creating the content briefs

You must ensure that every piece of content you create as a part of your content marketing campaign includes a brief. The content brief should clearly outline the goals that you have. On top of that, they will need to include a short summary on how the existing data you have is influencing the topic. You may also include details on the insights that you identified during the analysis stage.

For example, you figure out that a specific keyword is trending, and it has the ability to create a major impact on your content marketing efforts. Then you should make sure that keyword is included within the content briefs.

—    Start off with a benchmark

You can improve your data-driven content marketing strategy when you start off with a benchmark. This is where you should carefully assess and see where your content marketing strategy is as of now. You will be able to evaluate the topics, performance, and the channels that are driving most engagement. You will then be able to set goals based upon your strengths as well as weaknesses.

—    Mapping the content

You must have a proper content map as a part of your content marketing strategy. This content map must be influenced by data that you have as well. That’s because the content map can assist you to configure how each piece of content you produce can align along with the customer journey stage.

Along with the help of data-driven insights, you have the freedom to improve this alignment. This will eventually help you to have essential business intelligence with related to what type of content is delivering the best results to you or not. Based on that, you will be able to push the prospects down sales funnel in an effective manner.

—   Have a solid data framework

During the data collection process, you will follow multiple strategies to collect data. However, you should also make sure that the data you collect doesn’t just stay in silos. Instead, you need to ensure that data is available within a centralized platform. You can do this easily with the support of a content marketing software.

The content marketing software you use will provide a feature, where you will be able to capture content coming from multiple streams. Then you can map them along with the buyer responses as well. This is where you should take a look at certain important things, such as the Google Analytics page views.

Then you can understand what topics you present to the potential customers are the most interesting. Likewise, you can get to know about the most successful channels in terms of driving traffic to your content marketing campaigns. You should append this data along with other information you have, such as your email marketing statistics and ecommerce activities.

—   Ensure that you can pivot quickly

We are living in a fast-paced world. Due to the same reason, your business and the industry would change and evolve quickly with time. This is the reason on why you need to have the ability to pivot quickly. You can achieve that by ensuring agility in the content marketing campaigns.

You must ensure that you are responsive to changes that are taking place. In case if your data is showing unexpected trends, you should think about pivoting to ensure your betterment. For example, you should have well-defined content workflows and a content calendar. This will assist you to move swiftly. On the other hand, you can get into different subjects in a timely manner.

—  Continuously measure and refine your campaign

As you proceed with the content marketing campaigns, you will not be able to stop analyzing the buyer behavior and content performance. You should do this continuously and on a real time basis. As you continue to collect more data, you will need to feed that to the content plan. This will help you to refine your content marketing strategy along with time as well.

How to check if your data-driven strategy is working?

Now you know how to go ahead and create your data-driven content marketing strategy. You cannot just follow these steps and implement the content marketing strategy in place. You must also check and see whether the content marketing strategy you created is working or not. Here are some of the proven methods that you can follow to decide whether your data-driven content strategy is working or not.

—   Analyze the traffic sources

One of the best methods available for you to check and see whether your data-driven content marketing strategy is working or not would be to analyze the traffic sources. This will help you to determine whether your content is driving traffic to the website or landing pages. You can easily do that with the help of Google Analytics.

—    Analyze your social traffic

If you are promoting your content on social media, you must analyze social traffic as well. It is even possible for you to deep dive and confirm what social media networks are responsible for generating more traffic on your way. Then you can focus more on those social media networks and refine your content marketing strategy.

—    Check the positive impact created on your business

You may also analyze and see how your business is progressing with the traffic that you are generating. For example, you can check and see whether you are seeing an improvement in the sales. On the other hand, you can also check and see whether you are generating more quality leads for the business than before. Along with the help of a data-driven content marketing strategy, it will even be possible for you to enhance customer loyalty and customer retention as well.

Now you have a solid understanding on how to develop a data-driven content marketing strategy. You should follow these steps and develop the best data-driven content marketing strategy that you can ever think of. The efforts you spend to gather data and analyze data would not be in vain.